There are probably some six billion people in the world who don’t speak French. Which can be a bit of a bugger. But if you don’t, we do. Along with English, German, Italian, Spanish… Specializing originally in market research but given the frequent overlap of topics, we also now include conferences and business meetings, as well as coaching in English-language talks and presentations.

As our business has flourished over the years, our work in market research has grown from translating and interpreting focus groups and IDIs to conferences on various topics, from cosmetics to medicine. Ironically, perhaps, we also strongly encourage French people to learn to communicate in English…

Previously on its own site (fullfocusfrance.com, now closed), here you will find a list of central locations in France, companies whose main job is hiring rooms for market-research focus groups, interviews, concept labs, etc.

Frogologue, with great perspicacity and economic foresight, has entered the publishing business. Sales have doubled every year. In 2016, we hope to continue on this trajectory and beat our record and achieve the grand total of 4!

As much as we love the French language, we also believe France’s struthionine educational attitude towards English does it a great disservice. “An End to the French Language” is both a book and a talk on why the French should learn English.

For a few years now, we’ve been hearing politically-correct season’s greetings such as Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Solstice, Holidays, and probably more!

It is all, may I propose, crap.

Christmas has nothing to do with anybody real or mythological named Christ. Even less so Christianity. The character and religion have become irrelevant to the issue.

How many of you suffer qualms, nay, Doubts, or other metaphysical tantrums when you hear or, forbid, say “Goodbye!”? Really?

Let’s take a look at some common terms originally related to religious belief and see where they’ve gone. There are three main etymological sources

God

Jesus

Christ

Godson, -mother, etc.

OK, some of you in such situations, more of the parent species, may still actually believe in God, but you’re a dying breed. This relationship is more one of emotional family.

Gossip

Surprisingly, ditto! From Old English godsibb, “sponsor” or “godparent”, from God + sibb, the latter related to (pun intended) “sibling”. Terms later expanded to include people invited to attend a birth, then “anyone engaging in familiar or idle talk” up until the actual talk itself.

Golly!

And when as the last time you said that? Or Gosh! Both are euphemisms for “God”.

Gospel

OK, for the singing and dancing, maybe. But this goes the other way: originally Old English godspel, or “good spell” from god, “good” (not God), and spel, “story, saying, tale, etc.” which also gives us the Harry Potter type spell. And given the whimsy of the New Testament’s Gospels, saying “gospel truth” is a bit of a contradiction in terms… But let us not be divisive and move on.

Giddy

From Old English gidig / gydig, “insane, mad, stupid” and possibly from Proto-Germanic *gud-iga-, possessed by a god / spirit.

Begorra!

Beloved by Irish-accent imitators, and old Anglo-Irish version of the expletive “By God!”

Aujourd'hui, tout va bien... Du moins, il nous restent qu'une dizaine de centimètres avant d'être inondé. L'accès du bâtiment est sous l'eau et nous devons attendre la décrue d'ici quelques jours avant de pouvoir sortir. Pour l'instant, quelques photos...So far so good, sorta... We still have six inches or so to go before the water gets in. The building now has its own private moat and we'll have to wait a couple of days before the waters recede and let us out. For now, some photos...

Rue de la Plage

Rue de la Plage

Rue de la Plage

Rue de la Plage

Access road leading to houseRoute d'accès qui mène à la maison

Millrace behind the houseLe bief derrière la maison

Millrace behind the houseLe bief derrière la maison

The locals are fleeing as fast as they can Les résidents locaux s'enfuient aussi rapidement que possible

I regularly receive emails from spammers offering their services as translator (see my previous post), and almost every time with mistakes and howlers. They go into my ScammerTranslators folder.

Today, I got an interesting one:

Hi I’m Estrella Beetle from Oregon, USA. In October 25, 2015 I translated for your agency a document (birth certificate) from French to English. The price for this work was $ 25. Unfortunately I got ill (tuberculosis - TB - caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which affected my lungs) and I stayed hospitalized 6 months in Waverly Hills Sanatorium - 1600 Clifton Rd, MailStop E-90, Atlanta, GA 30333, U.S.A. Now I came home and I checked my PayPal account, but the amount of $ 25 is not entered my PAYPAL account. Please send me the amount of $ 25 by PayPal into account:

estrella.beetle@yahoo.co.uk

as soon as possible. I hope you are understanding and kind. If you will not send me the amount of $25 as soon as possible: - I will inform the websites: http://www.proz.com/ http://www.translatorscafe.com http://www.translationdirectory.com/ http://www.traduguide.com/ http://www.translatorstown.com/ that you are an incorrect translation agency which steals the work of honest translators; - I have a list of 1 million email addresses of your country and a professional bulk email sender. During 5 days I will send messages to these 1 million email addresses and 1 million people in your country will learn that you are an incorrect translation agency which steals the work of honest translators; - also I will inform all the newspapers in your country that you are an incorrect translation agency which steals the work of honest translators; - also I will inform the police in your city about this situation; - I will post a message on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/) that you are an incorrect translation agency which steals the work of honest translators; You reputation and your honor are more important than $ 25. Please send me as soon as possible $ 25 through PayPal. Kind regards Estrella Beetle

What’s interesting is that the scammer has taken the time to get an actual address (close, but false, it belongs to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and the Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a ghost!

Just so you know: • I do not do birth certificates • I do not know and have never worked with #EstrellaBeetle, but “she’s” listed on www.translator-scammers.com

A constitutional amendment is an alteration to existing principles or precedents. Let’s call them laws. The 2nd Amendment protects the right of American citizens to keep and bear arms. This implies that the right was not legally assured before.

Laws are time-related: with the advent of cars, new laws were written to account for the change. At that time, there were no laws limiting speeds to 70 mph or 130 kph. The laws were amended later as a response to the increasing danger of more powerful vehicles. So where is the logic in not amending laws on gun-ownership and taking the increasing danger of more powerful arms into account?

The American Constitutional has already been amended 27 times. One more would do no harm.

It started as a simple retweet to @Languagebandit’s post that “Modern forms of "to be" are a mishmash of 3 different Old English stems + conjugations, which is why "be", "is" & "were" seem so different”.

I copied and pasted a line from my (soon to be published) book Pour en finir avec la langue française suggesting that the present tense of the verb to be comes from four separate roots: bēon → be ; eom → am ; earun → are ; and is → is and got more retweets and likes than ever before. Which is interesting but not as interesting as the roots of the principle itself. When a verb develops out of originally different verbs, it is called suppletion, a relatively common phenomenon in Indo-European languages. In English, it is the present tense of ‘to be’ that gets the juices flowing, deriving from 4 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots: *h1es- (the copula is) → am and is*bʰuH- (‘to grow’ or ‘to become’) → be and been*wes- (possibly ‘to live’) → was and were*h1er- (possible alternative to *h1es-, via Old Norse) → art and are

Which don’t exactly match the examples given earlier (bēon → be, etc.) because they correspond to different stages of language development, but still show the potential for various roots of different meanings coming together into a single verb. We find similar situations in languages such as Gothic, German, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Old Slavonic, Polish and so on.

Another verb that likes to mix and match is ‘to go’. While in English we stick to the relatively vanilla ‘I go’ vs ‘I went’ (from ‘wend’, the current past of which is ‘wended’), Latin-based languages such as French, Spanish and Portuguese tend to be derived from three (or, questionably, four) Latin verbs : vadere and ire (both to walk, go, or move forward) & ambulare (come and go, walk, walk away from, go for a walk) → *amlare → *allare). The present, for example, uses ambulare / *allare (and no-one’s really sure about this development from ambulare or ambitare into aller) for the infinitive aller and most tenses plus the 1st and 2nd persons plural of the present, vadere for the rest of the present, je vais (I go, etc), and ire for the future j’irai (I will go). Why Romanian chose ‘a merge’ from Latin mergĕre for to dive, plunge or penetrate into is another kettle of fish.

But what we do see here are the traces of the difficulties earlier speakers had of expressing or interpreting intensity or subtlety of meaning with the words they had available. Suggestions have been made that the allare form existed in France in the 2nd C CE and might have resulted from a familiar military order: go! (Allez! from imperative ambulā́te with emphasis on its long final ‘a’ to allate with emphasis on its final ‘e’). And while ‘I go’ could be understood as a simple expression of personal choice and movement, the inclusive 1st and 2nd persons plural – Allons! and Allez! – could understandably be conceived of as a more coercive version of movement.

These are just ideas, tiny pieces of the massive jigsaw attempting to explain how language originates. One day, maybe, I might take a look at it more seriously.

One of the arguments the French put forward when vaunting their language is its precision. In many respects it is. In the phrase: “nous sommes allées”, it is unarguable that the number is plural, they tell you so three times: 1) nous, or we, the plural pronoun, 2) sommes, the plural auxiliary, and 3) allées, the plural s ending. So there is absolutely no ambiguity there, quite the contrary. Not only that, it also tells you that the people in question going are women, by the extra e after the past participle allé. But in common speech most people would have just said on est allé and left it at that, leaving you to guess who and how many, although usually indicated by the context.

What happens when they say “nous sommes allés”? Well, you’re buggered. It could be male, female or in between. And if there are 99 women and 1 man, it’s still “nous sommes allés”. So what? If anything, it reflects spoken speech when half the time you cannot tell number (how many) by sound (allé/e/s) anyway. But what happens with other types of verb? Take apprendre, meaning either to teach or to learn, precisely… and you’re buggered again: “nous avons appris”… seems to give you the same threefold confirmation of plurality, but you get the same plurality in the singular too: j’ai appris. And since “we saw” is nous avons vu, with narry an s in sight, it’s clear that the s of appris is not a plural. So much for precision… So participle agreement only matters in verbs conjugated with être. And you never know if the learners are women, nous avons appris applies to both genders. If a verb wants to specify the sex, it has to be the 3rd person: elle a appris or elles ont appris, she/they learnt. Note too that il l’a apprise means he learnt (or taught) it where the it is something feminine…

Yes, French is precise. Sometimes.

One of their complaints about English is its vagueness, which may be true. What is, after all a “unit”? Who are “they”? But one of the beauties of English is precisely its unanal flexibility. French, with its rules and regulations, its pedanticisms and archaicisms, its hallowed sense of correctness, is not a vernacular, it is a language of bureaucrats, and not this year’s either. It is a modern-day Latin, basically, a dead language.

There is a happy little meme bobbing optimistically around the web. Apparently originating from the Natixis bank, it soon spread to the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and thence to all lovers of French. It goes like this: by 2050 the number of French-speakers in the world will reach 750 million, ousting English, Chinese, Arabic and Gaelic all together. Most of its growth will come from Africa.

It is, of course, nonsense.

The French are past masters at marketing and mythology but this is almost certainly wrong.

Why?

Despite one glaring, and tragic, exception, that of AIDS with a penetration rate of 10.09% among 15-49 year-olds in English-speaking Africa compared to 1.85% in French-, francophone countries lag behind their English-speaking counterparts by an average of about 20% on just about every criterionyou care to examine. Take a look at the following list where English-speaking countries come out on top every single time:

Criteria

English-speaking

Francophone

Corruption (www.transparency.org: 2013):

37.88

27.76

Literacy 15-24 yo’s, 2006-2011 (UNICEF)

78.65

63.66

No. doctors / 1000 (WHO: 2007-2008):

0.17

0.10

Improved access to water (UNICEF):

76.71

68.63

“Open defecation” (UNICEF):

18.94

29.38

Under-5 mortality rate (IFPRI, 2014):

7.91

10.24

Global Hunger Index (IFPRI, 2014):

15.29

17.61

Human Development Index (UNDP, 2014):

0.51

0.45

Mean growth in GDP 2004-12 (AEO)

5.31

4.68

Growth in GDP 2013 (CIA Factbook)

5.63

3.59

Global Competitiveness Index (WEF, 2013*):

108.24

126.64

Democracy (CSP, Polity IV, 2013):

4.00

2.00

* Figures perhaps biased (up or down) by the fact that of the 34 countries used the GCI did not include Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, Republic of the Congo & Togo, all francophone… Why? Your guess is as good as mine…

Again and again, item after item – hunger, mortality, corruption, growth, etc. – francophone Africa loses out. If it were a game, they would have quit years ago, but it’s not, it’s human lives and human deaths. Instead, invited to Paris for prestigious conferences on “real culture”, the people of Africa allow themselves to be subjugated by the dazzling lights of French mystique, and lap the leftovers of former French glory.

Whether it is a question of language or culture is another debate. Either way, France – more right-wing than monarchical England despite its screeching liberté, égalité, fraternité – has trapped its Africa inside a fantasy realm of equality and rights of man while linguistically bogging it down in an antiquated language inappropriate for modern use and maintaining it in cultural servitude. Essentially, as long as Africa speaks French, it’s fucked. If it’s not culture per se, then language does the trick. While little children spend hours and weeks trying to understand the incoherent junk of French grammar, they are deprived of time learning the basic essentials of modern life.

For Africa to grow, it must switch to English.

The shift has already begun, with Rwanda, which some call the “ultimate turnaround”, switching to English for education in 2003 and continuing to advance in leaps and bounds. Then came Gabon in October 2012, initially adopting English as second official language and main foreign language in schools. How long before it discreetly drops French remains open. Burundi applied to become part of the Commonwealth in 2012, as did Mozambique in 1995. The snowball is moving.

To progress, Africa needs information, and it’s in English.

For further details, references, etc., please see Français hors de France!, in press, review copies available, just ask (click to go back to where you were).

Esperanto is what’s known as a conlang, or constructed language, invented by L. L. Zamenhof in the 1870s/1880s. Living in a divided community of Russians, Poles, Germans, Old Believers, Catholics, Protestants and Jews, where everyone hated everyone else, Zamenhof believed a common language could bring people together.

In itself, it was a good idea but, as various other conlangs have discovered, it doesn’t really work. Esperanto may boast the greatest number of speakers, about 2,000,000, but in its 125-odd years of existence has only spread to about 0.03% of the world population. Today, it might have a couple of hundred native speakers (poor buggers).

What other qualities does it not bring to the table?: • Other than the occasional novel or poem, it has nothing written in it. Everything has to be translated • Based on Western European languages, it is of no help to Asians, Africans… • Where place names help us understand the Celts or Etruscans, Esperanto has none • Where probably every driver in the world recognizes “Stop!”, who the hell knows “Ĉesu!”? • Where 80% of scientific papers are published in English (www.scopus.com), Esperanto has essentially none • Where 80% of websites are in English, there are at least 19 in Esperanto • Where the world population has gone from an approximate 1.325 billion in 1875 to some 7.350 billion today (up 550%) and the English-speaking world from about 50 million to 1 billion (up 2000%), it is clear that Esperanto has no future other than that of a tiny group of learners who have failed to understand the concept of sunk cost fallacy…

So, to reiterate what I said in a recent tweet: “Esperanto is a game”. It’s a Lego house compared to a capital city, a stick man compared to Rembrandt. It is useless.

Just been reading Robert A. Day’s How to write and publish a scientific paper. Still a good book despite it age, although not to every reviewers’ taste, as one commented: “Day is a writer for the ages–for the ages of four to eight”.

Here’s a passage I loved about a foreign student arriving in the US:

Unfortunately, he had had few opportunities to speak the language. Soon after his arrival in this country, the dean of the school invited a number of the students and faculty to an afternoon tea. Some of the faculty members soon engaged the new foreign student in conversation. One of the first questions asked was “Are you married?” The student said, “Oh, yes, I am most entrancingly married to one of the most exquisite belles of my country, who will soon be arriving here in the United States, ending our temporary bifurcation.” The faculty members exchanged questioning glances, then came the next question: “Do you have children?” The student answered “No.” After some thought, the student decided this answer needed some amplification, so he said, “You see, my wife is inconceivable.” At this, his questioners could not hide their smiles. So the student, realizing he had committed a faux pas, decided to try again. He said, “Perhaps I should have said that my wife is impregnable.” When this comment was greeted with open laughter, the student decided to try one more time: “I guess I should have said my wife is unbearable.”

Funny, but not very helpful. As the saying goes, “don’t laugh at foreigners’ mistakes, especially if you don’t speak a foreign language yourself”. What might be helpful is a social sharing website I recently discovered called lang-8.com (from Heyse Li’s Amazon Kindle book Hack Your Language Learning: The Simple Starter Guide for Beginners on How to Learn and Remember Any Language, which has a couple of good tips in it) which allows people to submit sentences in a given language and have foreign natives correct it.

This brand of coffee pods to fit the Nespresso machines has come up with the wonderfully stupid idea of over-packaging its product in what must be the most imbecilic attempt to convince consumers that it keeps the coffee flavor in... Yes, you tear open the plastic, wasteful and probably hard-to-recycle pouch and out pours a smell of coffee. “You see, it tries to say, if we didn’t do this all the coffee flavor would disappear! Aren’t we clever?!”

If anything, it’s the opposite that happens: if the coffee can be smelled before the pod is inserted into the machine and made, it means you’re getting less flavor going into the coffee drink itself (whether to any significant degree or not is another kettle of fish). Of course, it’s also possible that both the original and the copycat brand have pods that release an odor, but the only one that tells you that the odor once inside the pod is no longer there is the copycat.

English-speakers with poor taste in jokes will understand the title...

We live (and, in hospitals, recover, or occasionally die) in a modern, rectilinear world. And so do gurneys. When wheeling a patient along a corridor (or sidewalk), the rectilinear, unit structure results in joins perpendicular to the direction of movement. Usually, the floor of each room will be tiled separately to the rest of the ward, each passage into a separate unit ditto. The separator could be a simple door plate / bar / threshold, or just a change from plastic to ceramic floor tiles, Elsewhere there may be cable covers. As to entering the elevator (lift)!...

The result is a series of changes in floor height, each one a jolt to the patient on the bed. Whatever it is, the jolt could be significantly decreased by staggering the wheels.

In the drawing on the left, A represents the present layout. B & C are alternatives. Which would be better (I suspect B), I leave to engineers.

Warning: some of these images are offensive. It is intentional. Please read article first.

Type ISIS or Daech into Google Image and this is what you get:

Each time they see an image of themselves on the web, they see tough, warlike macho men with knives, guns and power. They love the attention they’re getting. This is what gives them a hard-on.

Us calling them vile, inhumane, murderers and so on is music to their ears. I'is exactly how they want to be seen, because it tells them they’re hurting us.

They do not share our values of modern, civilized human beings. They do not care that we think negatively about them. Their brand image is violence.

So let’s change their brand image, let’s show them in another light.

Like this:

1) Copy the most offensive image you can find (e.g. excrement, hemorrhoids, parasites, etc. try googling “parasitic infestation” or “tropical disease” for some repulsive images. NB: do not choose a pig, they’re nice animals and nice people like them too, see my examples below).

2) Name or rename the file something like “Daech_ISIS.png”, “Boko_Haram.jpg”. Make sure it contains words people might use in search terms.

3) Add "Daech", "ISIS", etc., to the photo title or legend (+ alt or title if html). For example, these two are coded thus: <img title="ISIS Leader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud" src="/ISIS_leader.jpg" alt="Image of ISIS leader" /> and <img title="Daech ISIS" src="/Anatomy of a Daech ISIS killer.jpg" alt="Image of Daech ISIS" />. For information, if you feel them personally offensive, as you should, they can be reduced for usual display by html tagging them as width="25" height="25". This keeps them small enough to be discreet on your website, while retaining thsir original size when reposted.

(click to enlarge)

This is the sort of image we want them to see associated with themselves every time they type their name.

Or you could go one step further and post this (click to enlarge):

Remember: it is important not to use material offensive to Muslims in general. Part of Daech propaganda is to increase Western islamophobia and increase recruitment of alienated Muslims youth.

4) Post your image on websites, tumblr, flickr, facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest and so on. Scatterbomb the internet with these images and send them back the shit they’re sending us

As the mass of images build up, searching for Daech etc., will show them what they are.

Today is the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, which the French call Azincourt.

Following Crecy 70 years before (26/10/1346) whose English victory was part due to the Italian mercenaries' crossbows ill-suited to the weather and their far slower rate of fire (about 4 bolts per minute compared to the longbow's 10 or 12 arrows), Azincourt was another disaster for the French.

Fortunately, the weather held up beautifully, and the day went well. Concluding a summerful of festivities and events, the big day was, well, not quite that big. Soothing speeches on either side and a memorial stele for both. Bands played anthems, guards stood to attention, and French and British soldiers laid the odd wreath and all seemed well with the world.

If nothing else it was good to see English and French all together in a positive mood to review a battle of little importance to today

The only shadow on the day was the lack of catering... About 2500 probably hungry and certainly thirsty mouths, and the local café booked (for local notables?) with everyone else wondering where the sandwiches were... And for some odd reason the museum was closed too.

In 1604, 411 years ago today, Kepler, former assistant to Tycho Brahe whose own supernova, SN 1572, was discovered in, well, 1572, discovered his supernova (SN 1604) in the foot of Ophiuchus, incidentally the 13th of the 12 astronomical constellations...

Which raises the question: if we add Kepler’s supernova to the up-dated name of Brahe’s stella nova, or new star, do we get two supernovae, supernovas or even supernova?

There is an obscure bunch of people “we” call “purists”. Who are they? Well, they don’t actually exist outside the argument from authority when people say that “purists prefer the term…” or “if you’re a purist, then…” But what sort of purist would one call upon to decide the plural of “learnèd” terms? Well, for Latin-derived terms, a Latinist, obviously. So one syllabus, two syllabi (oh dear, no, no…); one ignoramus (Latin verb for “we do not know” and loads of ignorami; one octopus and?... and octopus doesn’t come from the Latin but the Greek so the plural “should” be “octopodes”. And why do we go to see an opera, which is the plural of opus “work of art”? And do your kids get really excited when you tell them “we’re going to see two circi today”?

Purism, schmurism, it’s just a plain old form of hypercorrection where we’re not really sure and, to prevent being accused of philistinism, throw in a Latin-sounding term to make us seem smart. Well, it might work on the less educated, but probably has the opposite effect on the better.

So stick to English, almost every single word we have comes from “somewhere else”. Anyone know how to pluralize Hindi पैजामा, pyjama? Or Arabic قَهْوَة ‎(qahwa, “coffee, brew”)? Or Yakut мамонт (mammoth)?

I don’t have a clue and am perfectly happy with pyjamas, coffees and mammoths, although not necessarily all in bed at the same time. So, it’s supernovas, right?!

This is a rarity for me, because I don’t do politics, and for a very good reason: I don’t understand it and, in general, it doesn’t interest me.

But Trump...

As a President of America, he will do an excellent job. He will send out a strong message, loud and clear, to all peoples of the world, that America has gone totally stupid.

A large proportion of the shrill American political news has little to do with news: it might talk about it, but it’s entertainment, on par with wrestling and reality-show histrionics. Lots of noise, lots of posturing, lots of obvious fakery, and empty.

Despite their intelligence, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are vicious and stupid, match the bigoted, below-average American mind they cater to. Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Megyn Kelly are news porn. It’s sad. Kelly is actually very intelligent and possibly a closet Democrat, but that ain’t good for business.

Donald is business. And he probably means it too. To him, it all may even be a glorious, provocative, self-congratulatory rich man’s joke. But let’s see if he, and the rest of the world, get hoisted by his own petard.

Because he is a joker, not a comedian. He sure has his good ole rough and ready unapolegiticism, has rudimentary demagogic jingoism, but essentially, he’s pretty witless as to politics, diplomacy and international affairs. He can entertain the news looking for the hype and excitement, but in questions of world affairs, even the Faroese Minister for Sheep-shearing would eat him for breakfast.

But then again, America needs him, the world needs him.

We need him to become President of the world’s most powerful nation to wake the fuck its people up, to raise awareness that shock value and entertainment are neither politics nor leadership, they are cheap, vulgar tricks that play the pipes of democracy. And take its populace for rats.

America makes some pretty weird choices, and often for the press. When McCain realized he was going down, he took on Palin the palpable pixie of Alaskan idiocy to scatter a barrel of red herrings to the crowd. He would not go down as losing to Obama, he would quietly disappear behind the imbecile antics of a rodeo cheerleader and be saved, almost revered for escaping such an embarrassing association.

Trump is more dangerous because he could become president. He has every media sniffing his arse for the slightest whiff of scandal and offence, he has the money to pay for the spectacle the voting public need, he is the Clint Eastwood of modern-day America who can say “Make my day” to anyone, and buy them dead. Is that the sort of power we want in the world’s most powerful person?

Had a big day sweeping up the drive this weekend after the recent storms. The road was covered in broken branches and twigs. Most of it went onto the pile for the barbecue. A windfall, literally that which falls due to the wind, whether fruit such as apples or more mundane but valuable pickings as kindling, has now become understood as an unexpected gain or profit. Both terms co-exist, and are yet one more of the million examples of language change, this time due to new and related concepts grafted onto old, moribund terms, breathing new life into language as has always been the case...

Like most industries, market research has its own particular jargon, and a lot of French market-research speak is cluttered with anglicisms, modified to a greater or lesser degree. As words get dragged across the planet, they undergo what I call the “Brussels effect”. An example will make this clear.

Many – oh, too many – years ago when I was a young virgin translator, a client chastised me for mistranslating groupe de travail by working-party... Shame on me. We’re not here to have fun. “It’s working-group” they told me. And, true enough, it wasn’t. The correct term (in those days) was indeed working-party, but Euro-babble, Globish or just plain lowest-common-denominatorism had screamed for simplification to harmonize it with other European languages, as in German Arbeitsgruppe, Italian gruppo di lavoro, Portuguese grupo de trabalho, and so on. And today, perhaps, working-group it may well be.

The French make quite a to do about their language’s gradual disappearance from international exchange (brazen advertisement coming up: see my soon-to-be-forthcoming book French out of France) while belly-aching just as loudly about the decline in grammar, spelling, etc., among the population at large. At the same time, they fail perhaps to appreciate that that which maintains a certain static complexity of language disappears when the language become widely used. This is the inevitable result of a language evolving into a lingua franca. Now, French wants to have its brioche, as well as eat it. And while they may legitimately complain about their sloppy writing, it is nothing to the carnage visited upon that most sacred of tongues, namely English.

One of French’s most egregious examples of market-research speak is their use of “learnings”. Firstly, typically, it is the present participle of the verb to learn (and not a noun), and rarely used before the mid-20th century. Secondly, to many English speakers, its plural offends the ear, but presumably not the one that’s perfectly used to teachings or hearings. In fact its pedigree goes as far back as Shakespeare who used it in Cymbeline (1611) and even Caxton (1483) in his translation of Geoffrey IV de la Tour Landry’s Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles (“The Book of the Knight in the Tower”), written for the education of his daughters. So if it’s good enough for the head-splitting cavaliers of the Hundred Years War, it’s good enough for the hair-splitters of 600 years later…

Language changes. Is it for the better or for the worse? I don’t know, but neither Brits nor the French would be speaking what we do today if we’d always been perfect. Our languages have become what they are due in part to thousands, millions, of careless mistakes and sloppy writing.

The English nickname for the French as we all know is Frog or Froggy. It is intended to be a humorous take on their tendency to eat things the average Brit would prefer not to. Their name for us is Rosbif (roastbeef) and perhaps also reflects the stereotype Englishman bloated with meat, cholesterol, gout and wine of George Cruikshank, James Gillray and other. But these are national stereotypes and therefore different.

But why English “turkey” (the bird) and French “dinde”? It all dates back to the bird’s discovery in America and Mexico the 16th century, following various routes back to Europe. And given the multiple rabbit holes available the present article will be necessarily short and lacking in depth.

In brief, the turkey was believed (wrongly) to be a guineafowl, and these were believed to come from Turkey, so from Turkey bird to turkey was no great leap. Why then the French dinde, or poulle d’Inde, chicken of India? All the more so since they already had one of these dating back at least as far as 1380. The then poulle d’Ynde was the guinea fowl and Ynde was used to designate Abyssinia where it did come from. By 1600 dinde referred to the turkey and the guinea fowl was renamed from the Portuguese pintada (for “painted” bird) as pintade and the Portuguese itself shifted to galinha-d’angola, but I digress.

So far we have two “origins”: Turkey and India. Let’s assume that “India” is that vague otherwhereness which might be influenced from east or west, but doesn’t actually reach the country we know now. Why then the Scandinavian “Kalkun”esque names: Kalkun (Danish, Norwegian, Votic…), Kalkunlane (Estonian), Kalkkuna (Finnish), Kalkon (Swedish), Kalkoen (Dutch) and Kalakutas (Lithuanian)? Because they presumably adopted it from mid-16th-C German Indianisch / Kalekuttisch / Welsch hün (the latter exporting to Pennsylvania Dutch as welschhinkel or foreign chicken!), before they dropped it themselves and, after a brief flirt with turkische henne, opted for Truthuhn, said to come from the trut-trut call hens use to call their chicks (ditto put for its other name of Pute, but I remain sceptical about both these explanations), the resulting muddle of which possibly influenced Latvian’s Tītars where Latvian linguists hint it might have gone the way of “turcēni” but was waylaid. No comment. And what about the bizarre Bavarian Kaudara? Your guess is as good as mine. However, the hint was there: Kalkun < Kalekutt < কলিকাতা, or, for those who’ve forgotten their Bengali, Kôlikata or Calcutta. Which is not where they come from.

Nor do they come from Peru, which is what the Brazilians call it. The Spanish take a different tack: pavo, derived from Latin Pavus, meaning peacock, which it ain’t.

So roughly speaking, we have the northern part of Europe calling it Calcutta, an area of historically non-Protestant influence using India – Polish indyk, Russian индейка (indeyka), Georgian ინდაურ (indaur), Breton: yar-indez (Indian chicken); Catalan: gall dindi salvatge (wild Indian chicken); Basque: indioilo (Indian chicken); Sicilian: tacchinu (whatever that means, but possibly related to the Emiliano-Romagnolo tòch) or jaddu d'India (Indian cock), Armenian: Հնդկահավեր (Hndkahaver, where the first three letters seem to represent India), Sardinian dindu – and only one Turkey.

Only? There’s Welsh and Gaelic, obviously, with Twrci and Turcaí, and then the bloody Scots have to come up with Bubbly-jock, followed dubiously by Bosnian ćurka (pronounced kurka, are they on the fence?) and Czech krocan (have they fallen off?) which aren’t really convincing either way. But there is one more: Hindi-speakers call it तुर्की (turkī) and, of course, Turks call it hindi…

To the homelands then: Mexico (and Ignoring north America with its hundreds of Indian languages vying for confusion: Navajo tązhii, Cherokee ᎬᎾ [pronounced gvna, as if you hadn’t guessed], Cheyenne Ma'xêhë'ne…) with the Nāhuatl language where it’s called huehxōlōtl and, incidentally, producing the Mexican name guajolote. Were things that easy… anyone looking at the name will automatically think of axolotls, as well they should, because I suspect we have a whammy coming up… Axōlōtl is traditionally understood to come from atl meaning water and xolotl meaning monster but since we (they) also have Xōlōtl, a god of miscellaneous manifestations including that of duality, the “monster” might simply be the “otherness” of its surprising metamorphosis from aquatic larval form to terrestrial adult land salamander... Back to the beast: huehxōlōtl. Related to the god Xōlōtl or not? His name has many associations: twin, dog, slave, double ear of corn, from one of his dodgy disguises at a critical point in creation; he was hunchbacked, god of fire and lightning, protector of albinos and hairless dogs, occasional axolotl himself and also a hint of a bat. What to make of the name though? Let’s imagine that the term xōlōtl does represent some combination of duality, monstrosity, deformity, let’s also imagine a familiarity with turkey sexuality. During the breeding season, the snood, the fleshy flap of tissue on top of the beak will engorge with blood and swell like a penis. Could this, along with the saggy “chin” or wattle (which might or might not look like a double ear of corn) be the monstrous duality? Another track is an alternative (plural) of the turkey’s name: huehhuehxōlōtl, and since huehue can also mean "old", maybe it’s simple the mass of wrinkles that represents old age?

I don’t know, and I’ll probably never find out. So don’t take this too seriously, it was just for fun.

Think back to your French verbs and how to say you don’t <insert verb here> something. Je ne sais pas, je ne veux pas, etc. Anyone learning French sooner or later comes across alternatives replacing pas under various circumstances: je ne vois personne, for I see nobody, je ne pense guère for I hardly think. This, as I explain in my French out of France, is a result of what is known as the Jesperson Cycle, a switch in negativization which, in both Old French and Old English, began around about the year 1000.

In the good old days, verbs were negated by putting a ne in front of it. This was done in both French and English, for example: • French: jeo ne di → je ne dis pas → je dis pas • English: ic ne secge → I ne seye not → I say not (English has taken yet another step, borrowing the “do” verb from Welsh, but that’s a tale for another night, children)

However, the ne often weakened and a curious addition was glommed onto the end as a stronger, reiterating negation (and not a double negative: language is not math). Over several hundred years, the initial ne weakened further still until the second negation remained the only one. Interestingly, the second negation was not originally negative, but positive, or “something”. Some examples will explain the transformation. While French pas, literally step, in je ne marche pas may need a bit of arm-twisting to be understood as I [can]not walk a[nother] step, others are more obvious: je ne bois goutte, or I can’t drink another drop; je ne mange mie, or I can’t eat another crumb; and je ne vois point, or I don’t see at all (i.e. the tiniest dot). Some terms are borrowed from other languages, such as guère, as in guère utilisé, or not used much, from Frankish *waigaro, lots, and rien, nothing, from Latin res < rem, a thing.

The Jesperson Cycle, affecting languages such as Old Norse, Finnish, ancient Greek and others, is but one fascinating example of language shift over time, and what is “wrong” today is interesting for its implications tomorrow. Oddly, various languages have been simplifying for centuries, raising the question of why they were complicated in the first place, but highlighting what would seem to be a need for fluid, effective and economical communication in the more international and/or “advanced” societies.

So the anality of French insisting that we should use the ne when nobody does unless someone is looking has its legitimate reasons, but they are anal, as anal as the French Academy insisting that since prieure and supérieure derive from Latin comparatives, neologisms such as auteure or professeure should be proscribed. This is as idiotic as saying we shouldn’t say “sofa” because Turkish sofa originally designated a raised stone or wooden platform covered with cushions and such and they don’t sell them at Ikea.

Language is one of humanity’s richest mish-mashes, built piecemeal over centuries by everyday pignorami, a collection of accidental noises forced into a haphazard and often ambiguous communication system but one oftentimes striving for sense and logic. Some, English, Mandarin and Swahili, have simplified considerably compared to their peers to account for mass influxes into the relevant language pool of adult and language-hybrid offspring.

Basically, complicated or “esoteric” languages – and no prizes for guessing which one I might be referring to here – are harder to learn as adults, or even for children without regular and easy access to materials than simpler or “exoteric” ones.

English should be compulsory learning for all European children from a very young age, and all other languages should be abolished from the European Parliament.

Among the various spam I reap in my inbox every day is one variety that particularly annoys me: bloody translators.

Because they are not translators. What happens is this: they sign into legitimate translation sites, hunt out CVs which they then download. Using the translator’s name and CV as template, with an added combination of cooked-up details, they change the address and delete the telephone number, inject a specious email copying the essence of the translator’s name and send it off. Sometimes the switch is laughable, such as the one where the guy was unable to change his keyboard language and the Swedish address displayed in Arabic, for example:

It seems to work both ways: either “agencies” offering jobs then cheating on payment or, and this is what I see most, translators offering, for example, their aircraft-engineering skills in horse-breeding and “Voice-over talent with an educated trained alto voice” to my “esteemed company”…

Generally, the email is laughable. They understand the basics of deliverability (max 80 chars/line for text-only) but get everything else wrong. They promise perfect translations in utterly imperfect English and combinations that make the mind boggle: Swedish-Danish-Indonesian, or Finnish-Urdu-Japanese… They seem to be under the belief that including a Scandinavian language will automatically trigger a sense of trust, as may well it might. They often have more degrees than a thermometer – from harp-playing to nuclear physics – and specialize in everything from – this just in: “Technical, Law, Marketing, Engineering, Computer, Media, finance , cooking , Literature and Novels , legal, etc.” (notice the judicious use of spaces before the commas, both Law and legal, and the rest…) – which makes one wonder why they’re hawking their multiple skills instead of lecturing at Harvard.

Sometimes it can be quite sick, for example, the recent proposal by a Dutch translator called Anne Frank.

If ever the bait is taken, there are various tactics such as the overpayment scam or corporate impersonation if they’re “buying” or, if “selling”, they simply paste your job into Google Translate (which ain’t actually that bad, but still needs serious revising which they’d never do), then bill you and get paid before your relevant counterpart gets round to querying you about the meaningless drivel he’s been sent. For a fuller exposé from the viewpoint of actual translators who get cheated, read this article by Carola F. Berger writing for the American Translators Association, which you can find on a website that one time-courageous person has put up about them: www.translator-scammers.com.

As they say, it might cost a bit having it done by a professional, but not half as much as by an amateur, or worse…

Thank you for your transcription. Regrettably, I cannot use it. It is, and I flatter you, gibberish.

• You do not capitalize correctly, your punctuation is staggering and your spelling atrocious. Were that the only issue…

• You did not seem to have referred to the vocabulary I provided: “methotrexate”, a common drug listed there, is not spelled “methrpoxil”, “metrppoxil”, “metroplexate” nor even “amotril”. Likewise, an “anti-TNF” is not “anti tss”, “ants eff”, “anti tns”, “ati tfff”, nor any of the other sultry variations thereof you managed to insert, hoping to conceal your ignorance beneath a tissue of sneezes.

• There is no such thing as “algegic”, “algggirc” or “anagegic”; the term you might have been seeking in your bewildered brain is “analgesic”.

• “Cytokines” are not spelled “sitochine”; “dMARDs are not “demods”; patients are neither “siro positive” nor “siro negative”; and even with the greatest of generosity, not even a Shakespearean chimpanzee would spell “opioid” as “oppooo”. Lastly, and I really must stop here, despite the known benefits of cod-liver oil, an ad hoc treatment is never given on a “haddock basis”.

Nevertheless, you have tried, and for that you deserve payment. Given the inevitable complications in advising me of your correct IBAN and BIC, please ask your keeper to send me your institution’s address and I will pop a peanut in the post.

One of the names that intrigued me in my early days in France was Castelnau-le-Lez. "Couldn't they decide?" I wondered. When I moved to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse and dutifully entered the correct address into my computer, I started receiving letters to Saint-Rémy-les-Chevreuses. Nothing major in the grand scheme of things, this is how names and words change over time. Luckily, otherwise English would not exist.

But wrong. It is not Saint-Rémy-the-female-goatherds but Saint-Rémy-outside-Chevreuse, the latter being its neighboring town, once <i>château</i>. It comes from Latin latus, beside (in French au large de or près de and is spelled in as many ways as possible. The name with the most variants seems to be Auchy, all in the northern corner of France, with Auchy-lès-Hesdin, just 10 ENE of Hesdin (and 6 km south of Agincourt!) and Auchy-lez-Orchies, some 4 km WNW of Orchies (which has nothing to do with testicles as its name would seem to suggest, but comes from Flemish), both clearly reflecting their respective proximity. Further north there's Auchy-les-Mines, probably named after local mining industry like so many other municipalities in France (some 30-odd all told) and where the les could also just mean the, as it does in names like Aix-les-Bains, although this is obviously not the rule. Another "beside" name is Auchy-la-Montagne, which, at 177 m above sea level does not suggest craggy heights and may be associated with nearby (30 km) Montagne de Frémontiers, where the suffix -montiers often suggested a monastery, and the ascension from mont (hill, mountain) to montagne (real mountain) begins with but one small step. Auchy-au-Bois, or Auchy in the woods, just shows France's charming tendency towards the decorative. The le of Castelnau-le-Lez occurs in at least one hundred castle neighbors (Whatnot-le-Château/Châtel/Castel/Châtelet) and the only one missing, lé seems to have disappeared in the 16th C.

And some towns just leave you bemused: Choqueuse-les-Bénards – trouser shocker?...

Just spotted on the motorway (talk about captive clients...).That’s right, €48.75 per kilo... And to give you an idea, the average volume of common European trucks is about 90 m³, which means that a full load of Pringles (pack height = 8.6 cm, width = 8 cm, plus about 10% for packing and palleting, or about 1650 packs / m³) is worth just under €300,000.Expensive. Three times the price of steak, say a faux-filet @ €15.99 / kg (bought from the farmer at €3.80). But only one fifth of the price of Beluga caviar (or 1/200th if you buy essentially the same at Petrossian for €9800), although the comparison’s slightly unfair. What about smoked salmon? Yep, that’s right, Auchan on-line does it at €44.64! But since you’re not going to eat all that at one sitting, let’s get a couple of slices each (€6), throw in a lemon (€0.50), a steak or two (€10), some veg (€4), a decent bottle of wine (€12), a selection of cheese (€10), a box of After Eights (€3.5) and a couple of coffees (€0.60), and you’re done at €46.60.Alternative: potato starch, grease, flatulence, halitosis, burping, skyrocketing cholesterol, enough salt to clear your path for an entire winter and the mother of all thirsts…OK, you could also buy it in larger packs or even in bulk, but that’s not very refined, is it? :o)

While the recent and seemingly non-unexpected assassination of students in Kenya is repugnant, the 2009 discovery of 54 decapitated Vikings in Ridgeway Hill, England, presumed collectively executed by Anglo-Saxons, is exciting. The fundamental difference is time: today and yesterday.What it tells us, or rather what it can tell us if we put our fear on hold for five minutes, is that things will probably get better. The descendents of Scandinavia and Britain enjoy the most “boring” of peaceful and cooperative relations today. So too will the descendents of Somalian Muslims and Kenyan Christians.World War III has begun. It is a different type of war to ones with which we are familiar. It will be long, sickening, repulsive, shameful and utterly evil, but we will survive. Not only will we survive, we will learn and grow from it.Returning to our Viking raiders, those who settled in Iceland at the turn of the 1st Millennium were at times as violent to each other as they were to outsiders, they also used slaves, worshiped wacko gods, and happily sailed away for a summer season of rape and pillage, although the former is largely exaggerated. Back home, however, once A had killed B, and B’s brother had killed A, and A’s sworn-brother had killed B’s brother whose nephew set fire to the house of B’s grandson, they realized they weren’t really getting anywhere. So they invented a legal system. It worked and Iceland is today one of the world’s most socially advanced nations on earth.Hiroshima and Nagasaki told us that atom bombs were a bit more dangerous than we thought. Despite lots of saber-rattling around the world, we have still so far refrained from reminding us of this truth. It may well happen again, a fool and his big red button may be hard to keep apart, and if it does, the viral evidence will almost certainly force us to agree that this is not a good thing, and it may well be the last time we do so. This is not a question of hope, but of common sense.But does the world have enough common sense?No, but it will do one day. Learning and progress are almost impossible to prevent.Muslim rage will flare up to a degree the “West” or “North” can probably not imagine. We are if not Liberals then at least essentially rational people with the common misconception that we can all sit round a table and talk about this. We cannot, and it will not happen.What seems today to be either stealth propaganda inflaming passions between the various Muslim sects and hence encouraging internecine destruction rather than anti-Western, or the plain bloody-mindedness that comes from religious short-sightedness, the current spate of local bickering will spread.It is inevitable. Of this I am as certain as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow. However, as with Viking raiders and the sons of Anglo-Saxon raiders, there is always an aftermath, and the grass will grow again.

As a long-time admirer of 16th-C French typographers, I have often wondered about the signification of Geoffroy Tory’s logo. He is said to have described the broken urn (pot cassé) as representing himself after the death of his young daughter (the urn is sometimes interpreted as that containing his daughter’s ashes, of doubtful symbolism given the obvious spillage and Tory’s sense of accuracy).

However, as often with Tory, perverse punsmith and wreaker of rebuses, there may be another side to the story. Tory was writing at an exciting time in western history, a period as creative, innovative and transformative – relatively – as today’s computer revolution. The Western discovery of printing and resulting bandwagon of type-casters and publishing was as anarchic as the Gatesian first-to-market rush. Tory’s sense of style and order, setting the stage for a future standard in which he, as printer, would also hold pole position with all its financial rewards, was not without commercial intent.

In his Champ Fleury (1529), Tiers Livre, folio XLIII, Tory gives part of the explanation…

The motto (the others need not concern us here), NON PLUS (observed interestingly by Tory as being both French and Latin), he quotes as Pittacus, but is apparently from an inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Μηδὲν ἄγαν, and means “nothing in excess”, perhaps reflecting his usually simple typographical stylistics. So far so good.

The urn he describes as the bodily vessel of life, the rod or spindle is a toret, or a drill or device for piercing (the skull among other things) and since he designates it as Fatŭ which my very shaky Latin suggests might be a supine form of the obscure verb for, to speak or say, it could be another rebus reference to the word of God penetrating the human frame (or skull), or just as likely dog Latin for fate which, as he says, passes through strong and weak alike, and indeed perhaps knocking out his daughter and leaving a fractured Tory behind. A pot cassé also designates the bill one pays for damage caused by someone else; in this instance his suffering due to God’s cruelty? The flowers and sunlight represent the virtues and good deeds inspired by the warming rays of God’s good sun. Perhaps (and without any clear-cut evidence at all, I strongly suspect Tory of being a closet atheist), but toret is too close to Tory for things to be that simple.

Beneath, the book of life, closed and chained down by two ordinary padlocks and one combination lock, which is tantalizingly described in two ways: one hinting that the metaphorical book of life (experience, intelligence, learning?...) can only be opened by he who can work out the combination, in other words who can read (and what more important to a printer of books?); the other more mundane reader being God, whose legitimacy must have been sorely tested by his murdering Tory’s daughter. The chains and locks are the three Fates, or goddesses of death, in Greek Μοῖραι, the apportioners, with later Latin moira meaning a part or portion. Tory, a pedant like myself, liked to pile complications on top of red herrings and multilingual puns.

So my interpretation is this: I, Geoffroy Tory, hereby pierce (I couldn’t really get away with “shaft”) the printing profession by punching through the pot / vessel / collective wisdom and knocking a part or portion out, a worthless sherd, the dross. In Ancient Greece, an ostracon, or potsherd, was a broken piece of pottery upon which a name (usually the “bad guy”) was written to ballot the person off the island, to ostracize him, leaving the remaining body, despite the missing part, as that which is “whole” and good.

In other words, this (Champ Fleury) is how you do it (typography) and I’m the man.

Readers may be forgiven for forgetting my riveting post on consonants needing vowels, but for reasons I don't need to go into I was checking the origin of the word Salishan and what did I discover? Yes, it includes languages such as Nuxálk which includes the famous mouthful xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ (see here, which I now learn means "he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant", a useful starter in any language teach-yourself guide…

Now, there's synchronicity and synchronicity... I have long had the "intuition" that this is not simply "things" happening when you want them to, but the mind putting together two or more notions stored, somehow, somewhere, in the nether regions of the brain's memory: the data points are there, out of immediate recall perhaps, but there. Possibly, as I followed the chain of words from sxs's source language, Bella Coola, to its group, Nuxálk, I simply read that it's a Salishan language, and moved on. Later (7 months), spotting the word on a website rang the faintest of bells, but still said: "Stop! You've seen this before".

Incidentally, I am convinced that one of the brain's primary functions is not to actively remember (we'd be incapacitated by junk data) but to screen out information that would interfere with routine survival. Some people, regrettably, are better than this than others... Failing failing memory, we don't forget (everything). The data gets stored, and springs out later, surprising us at the "coincidence" when coincidence there is none other than that of the significance we ascribe to it under our immediate agenda.

Such are the delights of random occurrence, and this is the butterfly from which tropical storms are made.

Appropriately, OED's word of the day the other day (24/01/2015), was to "perendinate": [To defer until the day after tomorrow; to postpone for a day.]. Although not exactly the same meaning, and given as rare, it offers we procrastinators yet another day to lag behind ;o)

Like so many people, I am deeply disgusted by today's barbarian act of terrorism.

In solidarity (with a newspaper I don't think I've ever read), and like those who signed their names as translators of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (following an assassination of one of them), I am adding a symbol of freedom of speech on my site: a cover drawing from Charlie Hebdo.

They can find me if they want.

For those who might misundersrtand (I am also concurrently preparing the launch of a book of mine - pure coincidence in time), this is not an advertisement.

Although we cannot all, like the cartoonist Charb, state that we have no children, no partner, we can say that we are scared. In this respect, they've won. But they cannot kill us all.

So I invite everyone - private, freelance or company - to add a symbol of solidarity to your website or blog. If everyone represents "evil" (in their eyes), we will be less targeted individually.

Spurious or false etymology is sometimes known as "folk etymology" (which actually has a different meaning in linguistics) or Sunday etymology. Germans have a lovely term: "Kling-Klang-Etymologie" to indicate pseudo derivations such as Gott (God) deriving from gut (good) due to similar sounds. There ought to be a term "urban etymology" (well, now there is) to describe similar hopefuls. I want to propose the term "prettymology" for explanations that are either "urban etymologies" or legitimate but "nice" and appealing too. An example follows:

Liverpool is said to give senior citizens free bus passes which become valid from 9 am. One subset of the beneficiaries regularly attempt to stretch the envelope by arriving a bit too early with a combination of shopping basket, optimism, a fairly good understanding of human nature, and a nice smile, asking "Are we too early?", earning them the bus crew's nickname of "Twirlies"!

(For non-native English speakers: 'to early" sounds like "twirly", and "twirl" also means "spin" a verb often used in the expression "to take something (often a car) for a spin", the pun being that wheels must spin for a car to move, and a twirl is (thus) often considered as a simple, but enjoyable ride.)

Legend has it that R. J. Yeatman, co-author of "1066 and All That", had a "cave canem" (Latin for "beware of the dog") sign on his gate to deter burglars. When it was pointed out that some burglars might not be able to read Latin he replied, "They're not the sort of burglars we want".